Frank dedicated the Presley stamp at Graceland with the late singer’s wife and daughter at his side. “It was great,” he recalls. The Presley stamp became the most popular in the agency’s history. On the first day, the USPS sold 300 million Presley stamps and had to quickly print 200 million more to satisfy the customers who were lining up in post offices across the country to purchase them. Best of all, the buyers kept four out of five of the stamps for posterity rather than using them to mail letters, which meant the King of Rock and Roll was immensely profitable for the postal service.
After he left the post office, Frank went public with what he really thought caused the shootings. In an interview with the Washington Post, Frank blamed the postal service’s policy of giving preferential hiring treatment to disabled veterans like Patrick Sherrill and Thomas McIlvane. “When you mandate that—and the disability can be mental as well as physical—in a tiny, tiny minority of cases you’re going to have people slip through who are basically unbalanced people trained to kill,” Frank argued. “It’s a lousy thing to say but I think it needs to be said.” Frank also said he wished he had done more to change what he described as the postal service’s “paramilitary character.” He said that too many managers were former clerks and letter carriers who had taken abuse for years and became abusers themselves once they were in charge. Their attitude, he lamented, was, “I ate dirt for 20 years. Now it’s your turn to eat dirt.”
The Royal Oak massacre was a turning point for the USPS. In March 1992, it signed a joint statement on workplace violence with three of its four unions. The text, thumbtacked to bulletin boards in every post office and processing plant, stated that there was an “unacceptable level of stress in the workplace,” but that nobody involved in the agency would tolerate harassment or threats of violence. The APWU was the only union that refused to sign the statement; Biller dismissed it as a publicity stunt. Actually, the statement was only the beginning of a lengthy process. The USPS drew up a list of personality traits that might indicate a potential killer, including a history of violent behavior, a fascination with semiautomatic weapons, an obsession with homicidal workplace incidents, a history of drug abuse, and an inability to take constructive criticism. In 1997, the USPS created teams around the country to look for employees with these traits. Nine more workers would go berserk and nine more employees would be killed, but by the end of the decade, the incidents had all but stopped.
Meanwhile, the raging postal worker became a cultural stereotype. In 1993, the St. Petersburg Times came up with the term “going postal” to describe what mailmen like McIlvane had done. The rampages inspired “Postal,” a best-selling video game about a murderous postal worker. The APWU boycotted the game, but the publicity only seemed to fuel its sales. Newman, a maniacal letter carrier played by Wayne Knight, appeared on the popular NBC sitcom Seinfeld in 1992. In a 1993 episode entitled “The Old Man,” Newman revealed his occupation. “I’m a United States postal worker.”
“Aren’t they the guys that always go crazy and come back with a gun and shoot everybody?” George Costanza asked with his usual lack of tact.
Newman’s face darkened. “Sometimes,” he replied.
“Why is that?” Jerry wondered.
“Because the mail never stops,” Newman said, growing agitated. “It just keeps coming and coming, there’s never a letup. It’s relentless. Every day it piles up more and more and more! And you gotta get it out, but the more you get out, the more it keeps coming in. And then the bar code reader breaks and it’s Publisher’s Clearing House day.”
As funny as Newman could be, such characterizations mortified real postal workers. It was bad enough when Federal Express ran advertisements depicting them as lazy; now a growing segment of Americans seemed to view them as lunatics. The USPS did everything it could to discourage use of the term “going postal.” But people would continue to use it as a synonym for out-of-control behavior long after violence in post offices had dissipated and the USPS was overwhelmed by another crisis. This one would be more existential.
11
You’ve Got Mail!
It rained nearly every day in the Chiloé Archipelago off the coast of southern Chile where Gene Johnson served as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in 1962. He had left the United States a Democrat, but during his year in Chile he read Atlas Shrugged by the libertarian author Ayn Rand and became a Republican. When he came home, Johnson organized a group of Peace Corps veterans to campaign for Barry Goldwater, the party’s presidential candidate in 1964. He could find only five of them, but they were an enthusiastic little group.
Johnson fared better in 1968 when Nixon ran for president. This time, Johnson worked as an advance man, and his candidate won the election. He and his wife decided to see what life was like in Washington, and with friends in Republican circles, Johnson found a job in 1971 at the U.S. Postal Service. “I was the last political appointee because they switched to a quasi-public operation,” Johnson says with a laugh.
The USPS put Johnson in charge of a new department called Advanced Services, devoted to exploring futuristic mail services. Johnson tried fax mail, but it was too slow. “It took six minutes a page to send through the system,” he says. “The technology was not there.” He developed the Mailgram, which allowed people to have telegrams delivered by letter carriers, much like the system proposed by John Wanamaker seven decades earlier. In 1978, the USPS delivered 32 million Mailgrams, but that barely registered at an agency that transported 97 billion pieces of mail that year.
Johnson needed to come up with something much bigger. The USPS was losing vast amounts of money at the time, and its future looked even worse. The previous year, a congressionally appointed committee led by Gaylord Freeman, the former chairman of First National Bank of Chicago, had predicted that the USPS would lose 23 percent of its first-class mail by 1985 as people began paying their bills electronically and chatting with each other on networked computers. Freeman urged the USPS to start providing electronic mail if it wanted to survive the technological onslaught. “Unless the Postal Service really makes a commitment, which it has not made, to electronic message transfer, they face a really bleak future,” he warned.
Fortunately, Johnson was working on just such a project. It was called Electronic Computer Originated Mail, or E-COM for short. The postal service’s big customers, like banks and insurance companies, prepared most of their mail on computers. Rather than printing it out and mailing it themselves, Johnson wanted them to transmit it electronically to the USPS’s Sperry Rand Univac 1108 computer system in Middletown, Virginia. From there, the postal service would send it to post offices around the country where clerks would print out the letters, seal them in envelopes, and pass them on to letter carriers who would deliver these missives to people’s homes and businesses. “There was billions of billions of billions of pieces that were computer-generated and could be sent directly from the computer into the Postal Service and sent out to the post offices for printing and delivering,” Johnson says.
E-COM wasn’t terribly fast—the USPS promised two-day delivery of the messages and hoped to reduce that to one day—but it was quicker than sending a letter across the country the old-fashioned way, which took three days. Johnson’s superiors were enthusiastic about the plan. Postmaster General William Bolger said the USPS could charge 15 cents for these messages, the same as a first-class letter. “If you had the volume to support it we could do it for 10 or 11 cents,” Bolger added.
Almost immediately, there were howls from the private sector. Companies like AT&T complained that E-COM was just a step away from the kind of computer-to-computer e-mail that it hoped one day to provide. AT&T didn’t want to have to compete with the postal service, a government agency with its own police force. What if the USPS decided to enforce its monopoly in this new medium?
The USPS insisted it had no plans to get into e-mail, but it didn’t matter. The Postal Rate Commission, whi
ch had to approve the proposal, subjected E-COM to a contentious 15-month review. “I spent 20 days on the witness stand,” Johnson recalls. “They asked me eight thousand questions.” In the end, the PRC rejected the USPS’s E-COM plan and offered its own instead. It refused to let the postal service create its own electronic network between post offices. Instead, the PRC wanted to open up the system to outside telecommunication companies and let them transmit E-COM messages. The USPS would just stuff the letters into envelopes and mailboxes.
Johnson was dumbfounded. The PRC’s ruling might have pleased the postal service’s critics, but it made E-COM more cumbersome to use and much more expensive. The USPS would now have to charge 26 cents for a single E-COM letter. Johnson didn’t see how it could survive now.
Even so, the postal service signed up customers like Merrill Lynch, Shell Oil, the AFL-CIO, the Equitable Life Assurance Society, Hallmark Cards, and the Moral Majority, then a prominent lobbying group for the Christian right. On January 4, 1982, William Bolger sent the first official E-COM from a terminal in Washington: “We are very proud of this milestone in the history of the Postal Service and pleased to share this occasion with you through this message.”
The USPS sent only three million E-COM messages in the first year and 15 million in the next. In 1984, the number reached 23 million, but that wasn’t enough to make money. The Washington Post reported that E-COM’s biggest customer was Automotive Incentive, a direct mail car sales company in a Detroit suburb. It spewed out electronically generated junk mail: “This is your PERSONAL INVITATION to ATTEND the GREATEST AUTOMOTIVE INVENTORY REDUCTION SALE in the HISTORY OF MANASSAS. The Manassas Dealers involved MUST SELL 500 vehicles immediately!!”
In 1985, the USPS canceled the service, having lost $40 million on it. “A lot of people blamed it on the postal service, but it was really the Postal Rate Commission that screwed it up,” says Johnson, who had departed by then to work for International Telephone & Telegraph. “It just got so bastardized it didn’t work at all.” (A decade later, Johnson and another former USPS executive founded a company called Mail2000, which followed virtually the same business model as E-COM. They ended up selling it to UPS for $100 million.)
The failure of E-COM would haunt the USPS, which largely avoided electronic mail through the rest of the decade. It was clearly a risk for the postal service to dabble in this technology, and there didn’t seem to be a pressing need. The dire predictions of the decline of first-class mail hadn’t come true. Instead of vanishing in the 1980s, first-class mail rose from 48 billion pieces in 1980 to 89 billion pieces in 1990 during the bountiful Reagan years.
Yes, first-class mail was becoming a slightly smaller percentage of the overall volume, thanks to the junk mail revolution, but during this period, the postal service’s biggest problem was finding better ways to move hard copy mail, not worrying about the arrival of the electronic kind, which now seemed like something that wouldn’t happen for years to come. “Rightly or wrongly, I didn’t spend much time on electronic mail,” says former postmaster general Anthony Frank. “I spent more time trying to get the public and business to use bar codes.”
By the early 1990s, the situation had changed. A British scientist had invented the World Wide Web and people had begun to talk about “surfing the Internet.” America Online started mailing people disks that they could stick into their computers to set up e-mail accounts using dial-up connections. Soon, it had a million members. E-mail was described as something life-changing and even addictive. “I’d rather give up my telephone than my e-mail,” wrote Newsday technology columnist Josh Quittner.
Frank’s successor Marvin Runyon paid close attention to it all. Appointed in 1992, the 67-year-old Runyon had long silver hair and sideburns. He commuted home on the weekends to his house on a hillside outside Nashville, with a mirrored exercise room equipped with $40,000 worth of Nautilus equipment. After reading the New Age health guru Deepak Chopra, Runyon told a reporter he thought he could live to the age of 120. (He died in 2004 of lung disease, missing the target by 41 years.)
Runyon had made a name for himself as chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a public corporation on which the Kappel Commission had modeled the organizational structure of the postal service. As the TVA’s chief executive, Runyon earned the nickname, “Carvin’ Marvin,” for slashing 11,000 jobs as part of a turnaround. He had to travel with bodyguards after that, but his knife-wielding impressed some people. In 1992, Bert Mackie, a member of the USPS’s board of governors, read a profile of Runyon in an airline magazine on a flight back from Washington to his home in Oklahoma and decided that “Carvin’ Marvin” was just what the postal service needed.
The USPS delivered 171 billion pieces of mail in 1993, Runyon’s first full year. While junk mail rose by a healthy five percent that first year, the growth of first-class mail was slowing compared with the 1980s. This was troubling because first-class mail paid for nearly three-quarters of the agency’s costs. The USPS made $49 billion that year, but it lost $1.2 billion.
Runyon lived up to his nickname. In his first few weeks, he offered early buyouts to 30,000 middle managers. However, the unions demanded the same buyout for their members, and in the end, 47,828 employees departed, many of them carriers and clerks whose loss forced the USPS to pay a considerable amount of overtime to deliver all that mail promptly. “We needed a surgeon and we got Freddy Krueger,” said Vince Palladino, president of the National Association of Postal Supervisors.
But Runyon also wanted to bring in more money. Post offices started selling T-shirts, neckties, and coffee mugs decorated with the USPS logo and images of stamps. In search of another philatelic hit, Runyon approved a stamp honoring Bugs Bunny, a first for the postal service, which had never issued a stamp with a cartoon character before. Some serious collectors were aghast. “It’s impossible for me to see that this is anything but a crass commercial campaign that takes away from the higher purpose of the stamp program,” said Kathleen Wunderly, educational director for the American Philatelic Society. Bugs Bunny didn’t top Elvis Presley, but he performed well for the USPS. The postal service printed 265 million of the 32-cent Bugs Bunny stamps and had to produce 100 million more to meet the demand.
Runyon also wanted the postal service to extend its reach to the Internet. In 1993, he hired the USPS’s first chief president of technology applications to create products for the digital age. His name was Robert Reisner.
A baby-faced 46-year-old with an undergraduate degree from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard, Reisner was working as a consultant on the privatization of a government-owned telephone company in the former Soviet Union when he got a call from a headhunter working for the USPS. From his office in Washington, he had figured out how to hook the phone system up to an old Sputnik satellite so users could make international calls. “It was pretty wild,” Reisner recalls. His next step was to move to Russia and run the company, which didn’t excite him as much. The postal service’s job offer intrigued him, and he took it.
Some of Reisner’s new colleagues greeted him skeptically. “You know why we hired you, don’t you?” the head of the engineering department asked him. “So we can fire you.”
“Really?” Reisner replied.
“Yeah, we can’t do that with someone who’s been with us for 25 years. They don’t want to do these things. They just want to talk about them.”
That was nothing compared with the disbelief Reisner encountered from the technology industry. Some laughed outright at the idea of the lumbering USPS trying to compete with nimble start-ups, but it didn’t bother Reisner. “I don’t think we’re going to convince the net culture that we’re cool,” he said. “But we’re not going to go away.”
Some of his early efforts were awkward. Reisner helped the USPS launch its first website in 1994. “The Postal Service is on the information superhighway,” the agency declared in a quaintly worded press release.
“We have linked to the Internet World Wide Web, or Web for short. . . . Web users can view vast amounts of information in a user-friendly format and can jump to related information with just the click of a mouse button.” Visitors to the site could look up zip codes and take a postal history quiz, but they couldn’t buy stamps online yet.
Reisner worked with Time Warner on a short-lived experiment enabling the company’s cable television customers in Orlando, Florida, to use their remote controls to shop for groceries that the USPS would deliver. Time Warner lost millions of dollars and ended up canceling it. Reisner oversaw an effort to put 10,000 Internet-connected kiosks in post offices so that customers without computers could access the Web, but the devices sat unused in dingy lobbies. “It’s like a pay phone,” Reisner laments. “If you put it behind a pillar, nobody uses it. So you have to put kiosks in the right place, and it sounds silly, but you have to have someone plug it in, and you have to have a barker to show people that they can get things on it.” Presumably, the USPS couldn’t count on its window clerks to step in; it was difficult enough just to get them to smile at customers.
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